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Who were the people who left their dead in a cave 4,000 m above a Ladakhi village — and why does almost nobody alive carry their particular mix of ancestries?
A study published in Science Advances on Friday has reported genome-wide data from ten individuals recovered from Old Lady Spider Cave, or Abi Srinjamo Bao, in Kargil district. Radiocarbon dating placed them at roughly 1,500 years before the present.
Their ancestry splits almost exactly down the middle: one half best proxied by present-day North Indians while the others are genetically closer to ancient Tibetans. Chromosome segments shortened by 50 generations of recombination dated that union to about 2,800 years ago — a century before the rise of the Tibetan Empire.
‘This was not a race’
These were not travellers who died in transit. The bodies were carefully placed, says Veena Mushrif-Tripathy of Deccan College, Pune, who co-led the excavation — men and women, the very young to the very old, with the elderly predominating. “It indicates that this is a deliberate act of the people,” she told The Hindu in an email, describing a pre-Buddhist Ladakhi practice of laying the dead in natural caves.
However, a second team had reached the same cave first. In a preprint posted in January, Niraj Rai of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, and Maanasa Raghavan of the University of Chicago report genomes from five cave individuals and two from a second Ladakhi site, Hanu. Neither paper cited the other. Both groups said they did not know the other was working on the cave until the manuscripts appeared.
“This was not a race; these were different [samples] of the same site; and all the genetic research done was independently,” David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a corresponding author on the Science Advances paper, told The Hindu in an email. He also said he deliberately had not read the rival manuscript before publication, to keep the two analyses intellectually independent, and welcomed a second look at the same question.
A third population
The two papers converged on the essentials but split on the interpretation. Both found the people in the cave were roughly half Tibetan-related and half North Indian-related. Both found that a simple two-way mixture does not fit the genetic data: each needed a third ingredient, in the form of another population from Inner Asia.
The Harvard-led team thinks that this third population may not have contributed genes to the people in the cave because no physical evidence has been found to that effect. Instead, the team speculated that the third group might be related to a Bronze Age group from Xinjiang. On the other hand, the Lucknow-Chicago team interpreted the data — 17% ancestry linked to the Okunevo culture of the Siberian Altai — as real people who crossed the passes, pointing to steppe motifs in Ladakh’s rock art. Either way, two peoples met in the Himalaya or three did.
The papers also differ on when: 2,800 years ago versus 2,100-2,500 years ago. The preprint — which Dr. Rai said is to be published in the next issue of Science Advances — calls its result the oldest evidence yet of Ancestral North Indian ancestry. This is the component underlying most north Indian and Pakistani populations today, and has been the centre of a decade of argument over steppe migration into India. Science Advances says the equivalent in different words.
Kind to tissues
The question of whether these were Ladakh’s own ancestors remains unresolved. Unusually, for an archaeological site, there are no grave goods to go on. Dr. Reich said the ancestry resembles that of modern Ladakh, which indicates but does not prove that the group of 10 individuals was local. He also said the mixing long predates the bodies and may not even have happened in Ladakh.
On the other hand, Dr. Mushrif-Tripathy said the community lived astride a trade route, where admixture could have been continuous.
The remains were excavated in 2021 by Dr. Mushrif-Tripathy and Quentin Devers of the CNRS Paris, under the auspices of the Archaeological Survey of India, which cleared the export of samples to Harvard for analysis. The skeletal remains themselves stayed back at Deccan College.
The Lucknow team collected its bones from the cave floor in 2019 during a surface survey.
The conditions underground were kind to tissues. The dig, the Science Advances paper said, turned up “bones with naturally mummified tissues (skin, ligaments, and muscles), including two mummified hands.”
The analysis in the preprint brought to light what genomes alone could not: oxygen isotopes suggesting the group settled there later in life, a diet of herded animals and C3 plants (the most common type of plant today), and a brother and sister buried in the same cave 14 centuries ago.
jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in
Published – July 25, 2026 08:45 am IST
